With the Rule of Thumb concept, we are hoping to lower the bar for authorship. Not lower the bar in the sense of quality, but lower the bar in the sense of effort. This way we hope to recruit more volunteer authors. We don't want to scare people off from editing. The flip side of that coin is that we also don't want to remove incentive for non-trivial original research. The library won't scale (except for some of the dynamic content that can be generated) without volunteers. Even volunteers that write simple, short, Rules of Thumb, about arcane topics.
Regardless, the beauty of writing is it is fun. Today, I spent a few hours watching the Minnesota Twins beat the Seattle Mariners, and finding illustrative examples for explaining the difference between the SI giga prefix (10^9), and the proposed SI hella prefix (10^27) (see article http://www.comparexy.com/compare/Hella+vs+Giga). When the game was done, I had several good examples. I had skimmed through some books, including one that I had read 20 years ago and always stayed on my mind called Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
(see image on left); Great book. I searched through some science websites. I even pulled out a calculator, and counted a lot of zeros. When the baseball game was finished, I had the article, and references plotted out. I shared a draft copy with my friends so they could have some input on the ordering of the examples for the maximum illustrative impact :) I had a lot of fun writing it. Way more fun than washing a load of clothes.The point about authors is, it's has to be something someone takes some interest in. Luckily for me, I take interest in a lot of different things (more than some, less than others I suppose), and that is probably why I really see a value in a library like this.
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